On 5 Mar 2007 18:20:40 -0800, "(David P.)" <imbibe@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
>Robert <rob...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> "(David P.)" <imb...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>
>> >Do you have an alternative plan for the peace process?
>>
>> Same way you stay on good terms with your neighbors,
>> mind you own business. Respect their rights to make
>> their own decisions. But still be concerned about
>> their problems.
>
>http://www.meforum.org/article/1638
A person or nation will become known by the friends it keeps and
sup****ts. Any one still wonder why the U.S. is so hated by decent
Arabs. None of our allies will remain when we are driven out. Those
thugs will become Americas next Mafia.
>[...]
>European equivalence signals Hamas' sponsors
>that their strategy works. Europe's rhetoric may be
>strong, but its resolve is weak. An Arab boycott of
>Israel can last more than half a century, but the
>West's boycott of terrorist groups cannot last a
>month. Saudi princes and Iranian revolutionary
>foundation managers understand they should ignore
>Brussels and perhaps even Wa****ngton and continue
>to launch, fund, and sustain groups that embrace
>terrorism and eschew democracy.
>
>Wa****ngton, however, has given Hamas and its
>radical sponsors perhaps their greatest victory.
>Not only did the Bush administration fail to insist
>that forfeiture of armed political party militias should
>be among the ground rules for legitimate democratic
>participation, thus allowing a Trojan horse into the
>election, but once the scale of Hamas' victory be-
>came known the White House rewarded Middle
>Eastern terrorist groups and their sponsors with
>an effective abandonment of the Bush democracy
>agenda.
>
>Whereas Rice once spoke about the need for
>democracy and reform at the American University
>of Cairo, in her recent trips to Egypt she has ap-
>peared beside Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak
>and said hardly a word about reform. Neither the
>State Department nor the US ambassador in Cairo
>have spoken about the arson attack on the Ghad
>party headquarters, the kangaroo court conviction
>of its leader Ayman Nour, Mubarak's postponement
>of municipal elections or the videos of Egyptian
>police torturing dissidents that surfaced in Novem-
>ber 2006 after thieves stole several police officers'
>cell phones at a wedding reception. The State
>Department has quietly squirreled away and
>diverted funding to sup****t Iranian democracy
>and no longer, in practice, sup****ts reform in
>Saudi Arabia. Fathi al-Jahmi remains imprisoned
>in Libya, where five Bulgarian nurses also face a
>firing squad.
>
>Arab states and Iran have used Hamas to revert to
>a comfortable state of affairs in which they pay
>rhetorical heed to Palestinian political demands
>but, in practice, are indifferent. They fund terrorism
>that prolongs conflict and causes the Palestinians
>to further spiral into a morass. Their investment in
>Hamas has paid huge dividends. It will not end the
>Jewish state but, for the region's kings, hereditary
>presidents and ayatollahs, it sidetracks the far more
>worrisome agenda of democratization, reform, and
>accountability.
>
> Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American
>Enterprise Institute, is editor of the Middle East Quarterly.
>===================
>===================
>http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/22/MNGDANMPA91.DTL
>
>Torture video stirs fury over Egypt penal system
>New questions raised about human rights record of U.S. ally
>
>Joseph Krauss, Chronicle Foreign Service
>Monday, January 22, 2007
>
>(01-22) 04:00 PST Cairo -- The man in the video lies
>on the floor on his back, ****d from the waist down,
>with his feet hoisted into the air, surrounded by pairs
>of anonymous black boots.
>
>The camera captures an act of brutality before zooming
>in until the man's face, scrunched with agony, fills the frame.
>He cries out for mercy from his tormentors, but within
>seconds the words give way to screams of desperation.
>The abuse continues, and the camera holds steady.
>
>The rare footage, shot on a cell phone camera inside a
>Cairo police station in January 2006, is the most striking
>evidence to date of what Egyptian and international
>human rights organizations have long called an
>epidemic of torture in the country's penal system.
>
>The video, which appeared on YouTube in November
>and quickly made the rounds of the local blogosphere,
>has sparked outrage in recent weeks, casting a harsh
>light on the deteriorating human rights situation in one
>of the United States' closest allies in the Arab world.
>
>The United States gives Egypt around $2 billion
>annually in military and development aid, and the
>Bush administration has come to see it as a crucial
>Sunni Arab ally in its escalating conflict with Iran. In
>recent years, Egypt has also emerged as a prime
>destination for "extraordinary rendition" -- the contro-
>versial U.S. policy of kidnapping suspected terrorists
>and secretly sending them to be imprisoned and
>interrogated in countries that are known to practice
>torture.
>
>Torture in Egyptian prisons has a long history, but
>human rights experts say Egypt's participation in
>extraordinary rendition gives it an unspoken immunity
>from international criticism.
>
>"Some countries, including the United States, are
>involved in torture and are benefiting by having Egypt
>assume the role of interrogating suspects," said
>Bahey El Din Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute
>for Human Rights Studies. "They can't send people
>here to be tortured and then take a stand against it."
>
>In 2005, Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif said
>the United States had sent 60 to 70 Egyptians back
>to their home country for interrogation, including
>Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Islamist preacher
>who goes by the name of Abu Omar.
>
>Abu Omar was kidnapped in 2003 near his home in
>Milan and flown to Egypt, where he remains im-
>prisoned without any formal charges lodged against
>him. His case sparked outrage in Europe, and an
>Italian court is trying 25 CIA agents and a U.S. Air
>Force officer -- in absentia -- along with nine Italian
>secret service agents for their participation in the
>kidnapping.
>
>In November, Abu Omar smuggled out of prison an
>11-page handwritten letter in which he described the
>abduction and the torture he had received since being
>brought to Egypt. According to the Wa****ngton Post,
>which obtained a copy of the letter, he claimed to have
>lost hearing in one ear as a result of repeated beatings
>and described being strapped to an iron device known
>as the "Bride" before being shocked with electric stun
>guns.
>
>Montasser el-Zayat, his lawyer, said that although the
>authorities are no longer physically torturing Abu Omar,
>he continues to endure psychological torture from being
>held in solitary confinement with few visitors, and that
>he has tried to kill himself on three occasions.
>
>El-Zayat, who has represented several prominent
>Islamists, said Abu Omar was never affiliated with
>any al Qaeda or any other organization. "He was only
>an activist, and he delivered Friday sermons in the
>mosque," el-Zayat said.
>
>While high-profile suspects have attracted the most
>attention, experts say the majority of torture victims
>in Egypt are, like the man in the video, ordinary
>citizens without political affiliations and that torture,
>once reserved for political dissidents and Islamist
>militants, is now applied across the penal system.
>
>After the video surfaced, a local newspaper identified
>the victim as Imad Al-Kabir, a microbus driver who
>was brought in after intervening in an argument be-
>tween his cousin and two plainclothes police officers.
>Al-Kabir was not accused of anything at the time, and
>he has said the police filmed the incident and sent the
>clip to local microbus drivers merely to humiliate him
>and to intimidate others.
>
>"Torture has become endemic to Egyptian prison
>facilities, detention centers and police stations,"
>said Elijah Zarwan, a spokesman for Human Rights
>Watch in Cairo. "That the police videotaped every-
>thing and then circulated it among the public shows
>that they know they can get away with this sort of
>thing. It's yet more evidence of a culture of impunity."
>
>The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights docu-
>mented 34 cases of torture in 2005 and 27 in 2006,
>but Zarwan and other human rights advocates insist
>that many if not most cases go unre****ted.
>
>Although the worst forms of torture are usually reserved
>for suspected terrorists, the abuse of prisoners is more
>often aimed at collective punishment and intimidation
>than intelligence-gathering, said Dr. Magda Adly,
>director of the Nadim Center, which counsels and
>treats victims of torture.
>
>"Torture sends a message not only to the victim and
>the victim's family, but to the whole society, and that
>message is that if you speak out, you will never see
>the sun again," she said.
>
>On Jan. 15, the center, which sees an average of 70
>new cases of torture each year, submitted a list of
>189 names of suspected torturers, compiled primarily
>from the testimony of victims, to the Interior Ministry.
>
>Egyptian bloggers have also taken up the cause and,
>in recent months, have published several videos show-
>ing the abuse of prisoners. The most recent shows a
>young woman suspended by her hands and knees
>from a pole between two chairs, confessing to murder
>and screaming that her hands are about to break off.
>The woman's identity remains a mystery, but the
>Interior Ministry says it is investigating the matter.
>
>The Imad Al-Kabir video, however, remains the most
>graphic, and has sent shock waves through the local
>human rights and activist community. After a local
>newspaper located and identified Al-Kabir, human
>rights lawyers persuaded him to identify his tormentors
>and take the case to the public prosecutor, who has
>since detained two of the officers involved and
>scheduled a trial for the first week in March.
>
>But what at first seemed like a triumph for human rights
>advocates turned into a potential nightmare earlier this
>month, when the same court sentenced Al-Kabir him-
>self to three months in prison for "resisting authorities."
>
>"We wanted the video to be seen so that the criminals
>in it could get the punishment they deserved, but so far
>that hasn't happened," said Wael Abbas, one of the
>first bloggers to publish the video. "Instead, the victim
>has been punished."
>
>Egyptian law narrowly defines torture as acts carried
>out against suspects during interrogation. Since Al-
>Kabir was not, at the time he was tortured, accused
>of any crime or in the process of being interrogated,
>it's unlikely that the officers will be found guilty.
>
>The Interior Ministry, which is in charge of Egyptian
>security services, has denied it practices torture, and
>some officials have accused Abbas and other blog-
>gers of defaming the country's image by putting the
>videos on the Internet instead of taking them directly
>to the ministry.
>
>Human rights experts say the government is more
>interested in protecting its image than in addressing
>the problem of torture.
>
>"Everyone in the human rights community agrees it is
>a huge problem, not only in the police stations but in
>the entire penal system, but nothing is being done
>because the government refuses to recognize it,"
>said Hassan, of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights
>Studies. "It's grown into a cancer, and the govern-
>ment treats it like a mild headache."
>.
>.
--
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